Word: levying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What's in a name? For many, the indication that they are descendants of craftsmen: smiths, coopers, millers, weavers. Primo Levi, 67, is an Italian Jew whose surname suggests ties to those members of the Levite tribe who were entrusted with guarding the sacred tabernacle. Not ritual priests but deacons, Levites were workers with practical tasks to perform. Appropriately, Levi came to writing through chemistry. For 30 years he worked for a Turin paint manufacturer. Before that he was the unwilling employee of the Nazis, who recruited him at Auschwitz for his technical skills. While millions died for what they...
...surprisingly, Levi the scientist is fascinated by work and variety, a curiosity he shares with Libertino Faussone, the main storyteller of The Monkey's Wrench. "The world is beautiful because it's all different," says ! Faussone, an itinerant rigger who has worked on construction jobs all over the world. He is a fiction, says Levi, but authentic, a composite of workmen the author has known. The rigger's tales too have the pitch of stretched truths. On an eight-story tower, a mystery man collects dust that he claims comes from the stars. Faussone tells...
Last week provided a dramatic climax to this improbable real-life tale as Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, 77, now with the National Council of Scientific Research in Rome, and Stanley Cohen, 63, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The pair, who met in St. Louis in 1953 at Washington University, found the first of the body's many "growth factors": proteins that guide the development of immature cells. Said Nobel Committee Member Kerstin Hall: "Every single discovery in the field of cell growth factors has followed closely in the footsteps of Levi...
From her earliest experiments, Levi-Montalcini, who holds both Italian and American citizenship, focused on the nervous system. Before her discovery, scientists did not understand how organs signaled developing nerve cells to link up with them. It was Levi-Montalcini who first suggested in 1951 that the signal might come from a growth-stimulating chemical in the cells targeted by the nerves. Her hunch was confirmed in 1952 when she observed that single nerve cells, taken from chick embryos and cultured with tissue from mouse tumors, sprouted nerve fibers that reached out "like the rays of the sun." Her conclusion...
...Levi-Montalcini, the award assuaged memories of earlier frustrations. "Once Italy was not a country for research," she said in Rome. "Now, suddenly, things have changed, and this makes me immensely happy...